A Brief History of Witchcraft
Persecutions before Salemby Douglas Linder (2005)

circa
560 B.C.
1. The Bible condemns witches.

Exodus 22:18
Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live. (KJV)

Leviticus
20:27A
man also or woman that hath a familiarspirit,
or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone
them with stones: their blood shall be upon them. (KJV)

Exodus and Leviticus, two Old
Testament books that make up part of the "Law of Moses" and the primary
history of the Jewish people, were written in the sixth century B. C by
a Jewish writer—whose
name we do not know. The books, which include
the
passages quoted above that assume the existence of
witches and urge that they be killed, were most likely written in
what is
present-day
Iraq during the reign of Evil
Merodach, a dark time of Jewish exile, around 560 B.C. The
author was
most
likely a priest, and might have been assisted in his work by other
priests and
scribes.

The word "witch" in Exodus is a translation of the Hebrew word "kashaph," which comes from the root
meaning "to whisper." The word as used in Exodus probably thus
meant "one who whispers a spell." In context, the Exodus passage
probably was intended to urge Jews to adhere to their own religious
practices and not those of surrounding tribes.

circa
420
2. St. Augustine argues witchcraft is an
impossibility

Saint Augustine of Hippo, an influential theologian in the
early Christian Church, argued in the early 400s that God alone could
suspend the normal laws of the universe. In his view, neither
Satan nor witches had supernatural powers or were capable of
effectively invoking magic of any sort. It was the "error of the
pagans" to believe in "some other divine power than the one God."
Of course, if witches are indeed powerless, the Church need not overly
concern itself with their spells or other attempts at mischief.

The late medieval Church accepted St. Augustine's view, and hence felt
little need to bother itself with tracking down witches or
investigating allegations of witchcraft.

In 1208, Pope Innocent III
opened an attack on Cathar heretics who believed in a world in which
God and Satan, both having supernatural powers, were at war. The
Church attempted to discredit the Cathar belief by spreading stories
that the heretics actually worshiped their evil deity in person.
Propagandists for the Church depicted Cathars kissing the anus of Satan
in a ceremonial show of loyalty to him. As a result of the
Church's sustained attacks, the public's understanding of Satan moved
from that of a mischievous spoiler to a deeply sinister force.

1273
4. Thomas Aquinas argues that demons exist that try to lead
people into temptation.

In Summa Theologian, a Dominican monk named
Thomas Aquinas made his case for the existence of God. In his
work, much of which became adopted as the orthodoxy of the Church,
Aquinas argued that the world was full of evil and dangerous
demons. Among other things, Aquinas argued, these demons had the
habit of reaping the sperm of men and spreading it among women.
In Aquinas's mind, sex and witchcraft begin what will become a long
association. Demons thus are seen as not merely seeking their own
pleasure, but intent also on leading men into temptation.

mid-1400s
5. Witchcraft trials erupt in Europe

Many adherents of Catharism, fleeing a papal inquisition
launched against their alleged heresies, had migrated into Germany and
the Savoy. Torture inflicted on heretics suspected of magical
pacts or
demon-driven sexual misconduct led to alarming confessions.
Defendants
admitted to flying on poles and animals to attend assemblies presided
over by Satan appearing in the form of a goat or other animal.
Some
defendants told investigators that they repeatedly kissed Satan's anus
as a display of their loyalty. Others admitted to casting spells
on
neighbors, having sex with animals, or causing storms. The
distinctive
crime of witchcraft began to take shape.

Pope Innocent
announced that satanists in Germany were meeting with demons, casting
spells that destroyed crops, and aborting infants. The pope asked
two friars, Heinrich Kramer (a papal inquisitor of sorcerers from
Innsbruck) and Jacob Sprenger, to publish a full report on the
suspected witchcraft. Two years later, the friars published Malleus maleficarum ("Hammer of
Witches") which put to rest the old orthodoxy that witches were
powerless in the face of God to a new orthodoxy that held Christians
had an obligation to hunt down and kill them. The Malleus told frightening tales of
women who would have sex with any convenient demon, kill babies, and
even steal penises. (The friars asked, "What is to be thought of
those witches who collect...as many as twenty or thirty members
together, and put them in a bird's nest or shut them up in a box, where
they move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn?")
Over the next forty years, the Malleus
would be reprinted thirteen
times and come to help define the crime of witchcraft. Much of
the book offered hints to judges and prosecutors, such as the authors'
suggestion to strip each suspect completely and inspect the body to see
whether a mole was present that might be a telltale sign of consort
with demons, and to have the defendants brought into court backwards to
minimize their opportunities to cast dangerous spells on officials.

Outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria, with subsequent mass
executions, began to appear in the early 1500s. Authorities in
Geneva, Switzerland burned 500 acccused witches at the stake in
1515. Nine years later in Como, Italy, a spreading spiral of
witchcraft charges led to as many as 1000 executions.

The Reformation divided Europe between Protestant regions and those
loyal to the Pope, but Protestants took the crime of witchcraft no less
seriously--and arguably even more so--than Catholics. Germany,
rife with sectarian strife, saw Europe's greatest execution rates of
witches--higher than those in the rest of the Continent combined.
Witch hysteria swept France in 1571 after Trois-Echelles, a defendant
accused of witchcraft from the court of Charles IX, announced to the
court that he had over 100,000 fellow witches roaming the
country. Judges responding to the ensuing panic by eliminating
for those accused of witchcraft most of the protections that other
defendants enjoyed. Jean Bodin in his 1580 book, On the
Demon-Mania of Sorcerers, opened the door to use of
testimony by children against parents, entrapment, and instruments of
torture.

Over the 160 years from 1500 to 1660, Europe saw between 50,000
and
80,000 suspected witches executed. About 80% of those killed
were women. Execution rates varied greatly by country, from a
high of about 26,000 in Germany to about 10,000 in France, 1,000 in
England, and only four in Ireland. The lower death tolls in
England and Ireland owe in part to better procedural safeguards in
those countries for defendants.

1591
8. King James authorizes the torture of suspected witches in
Scotland

Scotland's witch-hunting had its origins in the
marriage of King James to Princess Anne of Denmark. Anne's voyage
to Scotland for the wedding met with a bad storm, and she ended
up taking refuge in Norway. James traveled to Scandinavia and the
wedding took place in at Kronborg Castle in Denmark. After a long
honeymoon in
Denmark, the royal newlyweds encountered terrible seas on the return
voyage, which the
ship's captain blamed on witches. When six Danish women confessed
to having caused the storms that bedeviled King James, he began to take
witchcraft seriously. Back in Scotland, the paranoid James
authorized torture of suspected witches. Dozens of condemned
witches in the North Berwick area were burned at the stake in what
would be the largest witch-hunt in British history. By 1597,
James began to address some of the worst prosecutorial abuses, and
witch-hunting abated somewhat.

King James VI of Scotland
(later King James I of England)

1606
9. Shakespeare's Macbeth performed

Banquo and Macbeth are greeted by the three witches.

As an indication of the attention witch-hunting had begun
to attract in England during the executions in the era of King James,
Shakespeare wrote a play, Macbeth, in which strange, bearded, hag-like
witches play prominent roles.

1640s
10. Witch-hunting, after a major outbreak in France, begins to
decrease.

In
1643-1645, the largest witch-hunt in French history occurred.
During those two years there were at least 650 arrests in Languedoc
alone. The same time was one of intense witch-hunting in England,
as the English civil war created an atmosphere of unrest that fueled
the hunting, especially under Matthew Hopkins. The Thirty Years
War,a conflict that raged in several European
states from 1618-1648 following an attempted rebellion by
Protestants in Bohemia from the Roman Catholic Hapsburg rulers,
produced slaughter and suffering that sparked additional witch hunts.
The
number of trials began to drop sharply, however, in the late
1640s. Holland, for example, was by 1648 a tolerant society that
had done away with punishments for witchcraft.

In 1682, Temperance Lloyd, a senile woman from Bideford, became the
last witch ever executed in England. Lord Chief Justice Sir
Francis North, a passionate critic of witchcraft trials, investigated
the Lloyd case and denounced the prosecution as deeply flawed.
Sir Francis North wrote, "The evidence against them was very full and
fanciful, but their own confessions exceeded it. They appeared
not only weary of their own lives but to have a great deal of skill to
convict themselves."
North's criticism of the Lloyd case helped discourage additional
prosecutions and witch-hunting shifted from one side of the Atlantic to
the other, with the outbreak of hysteria in Salem in 1692.

The Enlightenment, beginning in the late 1680s, contributed to the end
of witch-hunts throughout Europe. The Enlightenment brought
empirical reason, skepticism, and humanitarianism, each of which helped
defeat the superstitions of the earlier age. The Enlightenment
suggested that there was no empirical evidence that alleged witches
caused real harm, and taught that the use of torture to force
confessions was inhumane.